Lot 265
Louis Lamont
American, (20th/21st century)
outsider art, The Black Hell, 1995
oil on board
Signed lower right.
Painting The Past Into A Presence Artist Gains Understanding Of Self, Vanishing AmericaMarch 10, 1996|by MELANIE NOVAK, The Morning Call:
It seems that outsider artist Louis Lamont has been invited in.
Despite his lack of formal training, credentials or affiliations, he had a heady success at the opening of his second show last month at the Karl Stirner Gallery in the Easton Arts Building. Discovering himself as an artist, says the Coplay man, has helped him understand a lifetime of hopeless fragments.
As the artist stands in the gallery where the primitive vibrance of his work is displayed, he says he's learning to look at his past through this new, objective prism.
"Over the years I've had had a lot of failures," said Lamont, sandy-haired and youthful at 57. "I pretty much failed at everything I tried. But I always thought that somehow I was in the wrong place."
As an artist, the failures don't matter, he said. "People accept me because it's eccentric."
Then he stops, thinks, and peels away another layer of irony.
"But I don't really know what goes on in the art world," he said. "What goes on behind the scenes is a mystery to me. I just paint."
His subject is what he calls a quickly-vanishing America, where every corner grocery and tired city hotel tells a different story. He travels regularly to Manhattan and each year to Chicago, spending days painting outdoors in parks and streets.
The figures in his paintings are prostitutes and drunks and anonymous pedestrians, shaped stark and crude in brilliant light and solemn dark. Here is a "lady of the evening" as Lamont calls her, leaning on a bar. The men she's had -- soldiers, construction workers -- are painted directly onto the frame, a recent innovation in Lamont's work.
He also draws inspiration from a family deeply rooted in the coal regions of Luzerne County. Born in Hazleton of Slovak and Italian heritage, Lamont has relatives who died in the mines. He remembers countless workers' stories and can describe men wearing the "miner's tattoo," a permanent scar left when coal dust gets into a cut that heals over.
His scenes of miners and their wives and children and bosses are more dreamlike, less ordered than the cityscapes. Skies are green, clouds are moroffer purple, and the coal itself is glistening with tiny strokes of rainbow colors.
"I've never been inside a breaker, never really seen the inside of a mine," he said. "So it was kind of hard to paint the coal. These are memory paintings."
One of Lamont's favorite paintings depicts an aunt, chin in hand, sitting serenely next to her alcoholic husband. Wispy brush strokes evoke cheap, flowered wallpaper. On one wall, a framed religious icon; on the opposite, a window framing a breaker on a mountain outside. The arrangement creates an uncomfortable, trapped feeling of two dimensions trying to be three.
Lamont's painting of the 1887 Latimer Massacre is on permanent exhibit in his hometown Hazleton Museum, an honor of which he is most proud.
"That was a group of miners who were murdered during a strike," Lamont explains. "The leader of the group was carrying the American Flag, and they shot him."
Lamont, who grew up as the only child of a career Army man, moved several times, feeling as if he belonged nowhere. His childhood included a stint in reform school -- punishment for falling in with the wrong cousins during a summer vacation.
"I saw some horrible things there (reform school), things that I will remember for the rest of my life," he said.
"I always thought of myself as an intellectual, someone a little more sensitive to things, but I could never understand that. Reform school wasn't the place for it."
So it wasn't until his late 40s that Lamont began to paint, trying at first to follow the techniques of an artist he saw on television.
"I started out with mountains, nice pinks and whites," he said. "And military paintings -- Civil War stuff."
He sold them at his mother's encouragement at parking lot flea markets. It was there Stirner and a friend made their own discovery.
"Karl went right past the military stuff and picked up the little sketches of regular people," Lamont said.
"I bought everything he had and encouraged him to do more," said Stirner, a sculptor and established patron in the Easton arts community.
Lamont basks in his newfound confidence, yet is filled with contradictions. As he talks about his work, his conversations bubble over into tales of his travels to Africa and Europe, or his childhood imaginings.
"I'm a really shy person," he said, and then laughs when he realizes how much talking he's done.
"Well, once I get talking, it's kind of hard to stop. It comes from growing up. A lot of the times I was all by myself.
"But I have to be alone to paint."
- Dimensions: 21 1/2"H x 27 1/2"W (sight), 24 1/4"H x 30 1/4"W (frame)
- Medium: oil on board
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